Dragonfly Painting – Chinese brush style
Our good friends supplied me with some gorgeous handmade mulberry bark paper from Thailand – where they deal in fair trade amongst various communities.
This paper is also known as Rice Paper but it is made from Mulberry trees. It is beautiful to paint on in a spontaneous, direct way much like the Chinese style of brush painting called Shui-mo..
I have been experimenting with this style of painting with dragonfly imagery and these are some examples of the results. Once the paint has touched the paper’s silky surface, there can be no mistakes- expression, fluidity and focus are elements that help to make a successful painting on this kind of paper. It is a lovely challenge, and a wonderfully mindful way to create – quite relaxing and meditative…
Dragonfly Picture with Bamboo
I am looking at plants, insects and flowers in a completely different way now- in terms of their essence and how to capture this in a few simple brush strokes.
These paintings are available from my Online Shop here: Original Paintings
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Dragonfly Pictures
Thought I’d quickly post this collage of new Dragonfly works that I have obsessively been painting on scraps of lovely paper left over from my Printmaking.
They have been great to do -mostly because I love depicting dragonflies whenever I can, on whatever I can(T-shirts ,Bags, Prints)
The first one is a dragonfly sojourn at midnight under a full Moon – kind of dark but I like that … and the black & white drawing is still a work in progress, so we will see how it develops. The bottom one is a Japanese-style watercolour painting on beautiful handmade Mulberry bark paper from Thailand – this kind of textured natural paper is really interesting to work on – it is not a watercolour paper so does not allow the paint to blend on the surface- more suited to quick line work. Here is an original for sale.
They were very popular during the Art Nouveau era as they are so stylistically suited to the flowing organic forms of Nature depicted by the designers of that time. Tiffany and Lalique have some of my favourite pieces of dragonflies- so inspiring !
I just wish things were made like that still, with care and great imagination; that’s why I have been slowly developing my own range of Art Nouveau Jewellery. -in honour of this forgotten era
thanks for looking – there will be some darker stuff coming soon….
